Cold Comfort
by dora1
Summary: PostEntropy, Season 6. Branches off. Spike's leaving town. SpikeBuffy, or maybe SpikeAnya. Try it, you might like it... To be updated
1. Default Chapter

Cold Comfort

Set after 'Entropy', Season Six.

His mind keeps going back to what had happened between them in the shop.

How she'd touched him, his hand.

What came afterwards was hungry and passionate, but desperate, with a taste of cold comfort about it, so that its memory is warm and chilling at the same time.

But how she'd laid her hand on his as he held the glass to her lips, curled her fingers over his - when has he been touched like that?

With softness, with deliberation, with a look that was pleading and grateful and confiding. He has never felt so human, or so greedy.

His mind goes back to Buffy, as well. Walking away. Looking knives at him for two cold beats and turning on her heel.

Then he knew that he'd lost her, flung away the last stake he had in her. Had he thought he'd won something, bringing that preposterous punk chick to Xander's wedding? She'd been caught by surprise, ambushed. Raw, for a moment.

He could have left it at that, left them both with some rare dignity, held the luminous memory of her sadness amongst the museum-pieces of his mind for the next two hundred years.

Who's got that kind of patience, though? Not Spike, who gets frustrated by the time it takes to chew M&Ms.

Had it been in the back of his mind last night? Taking out other girls, that's a good one. Gets her all teary-eyed. Try shagging her mate.

Even afterwards, when he'd been buttoning up his jeans in the devastated silence of the Magic Box? He'd been dead wrong, if he'd thought so.

It hadn't drawn Buffy back to him. It had freed her.

Shown her that anyone could do what she'd done: take refuge, help herself to what was there. Spike wasn't her own delicious narcotic, her private nightmare and dream. Someone for whose pain she could not be held to account; someone invisible in the economics of love. Something for nothing.

Buffy likes to be loved; he's just realising how much, what it had meant to her to have so much urgent and enduring, greedy and selfless love poured out before her.

Tonight that's all over; he's blown it all. She's free to hate him now.

Bet it feels sweet, he thinks. He knows: hates her too, a bit. It's a relief, as always.

Just convenient, she'd said. He could have drained her blood then; quick enough to give himself hiccups.

Never lasted long, though, those flashes of viciousness. Even her arrogance was dazzling to him - pure and perfect and complete. He could never compete. He was hopeless, he was lost. Abusive was how he loved her.

Just before the house had come down she'd said, teeth clenched, 'You like me because you enjoy getting beat down.' He had forced it out of her, out of the huge store of undeniable things she refused to know that she knew. But he had hardly noticed its truth himself: it was too near the bone - loving and being beaten down weren't even separate ideas in his mind. He thinks of Anya. Thank you, she'd said. He thinks of her gentleness and her gratefulness as a present. Something he's never been given.

He lies in his crypt, the sober two-fifths of him half-expecting an outraged caveman to burst through the door, intent on giving him a belting.

It's happened before.

No-one comes, though. After a while there's no more scotch, and memories of the last few days begin to seep through the mist. He doesn't fancy that. He'll go get something from Willy's. Some bourbon to keep the edges off. Some overpriced juiced-up pig to remind him he's a has-been and a doormat and a misfit.

He feels better after a meal. Still back-to-the-wall suicidal, still abased and powerless and bereaved, but less shaky. Doesn't care to be seen around the Hellmouth trembling like a blossom in the breeze, sniffling like a girl because the Slayer doesn't want a little bit of pet fang any more.

He's getting near the Magic Box, but he carries on anyway. As he gets closer, he can see lights in the window. It's late - he hadn't really expected anyone to be there, had thought this was just another piece of pointless pilgrimage to a Buffy place. Could it be Anya in there, he wonders? She's the most likely, it's her place now. She'd be working late, naturally, taking her mind off the wreck, off the feeling of having no sensitive manly beefcake to go home to.

He'd like to see her. See if she's all right. Kind of owes her, considering.

He lights a cigarette, leans against the doorframe of the shop. There's a noise from inside; and a female voice, plaintive, says, 'damn!'

Anya.

The voice decides him - it reminds him that she used it, days ago, to confide in him, to say drunk, sugary, strangely-skewed things softly in his ear.

He stubs out his cigarette.

She looks up at the sound of the door opening. She's seated at the table, surrounded by books and whatnot. Her expression doesn't change. Spike finds himself wiping his hands on his jeans.

'Warm night,' he says.

'Sure,' says Anya. Her eyes have a glazed look. Spike straightens a pile of papers with one finger.

'Yep, looks like we're in for another warm spell.'

She turns back to her book without answering him.

'You - uh - got air conditioning here?'

'Sure.'

'That… er… whirring noise doesn't give you a headache? I remember -'

'Spike. I'm really busy right now.'

He half-smiles.

'If you'd like some help staring at that table, love, I'd be happy to oblige.'

'Maybe I've used the wrong phrase.' There's a hostile edge to her tone. 'I thought "I'm busy right now" was a way to politely suggest that the other person should get lost.'

Spike's shoulders droop infinitesimally.

'Fine,' he says. 'I can take a polite implication. Terribly sorry to have interrupted you doing bugger-all.'

His hand on the door-knob, Anya makes a noise like cat sneezing and slaps her book shut. He turns.

'What kind of stupid are you?' she demands.

'What's my choice?' he asks cautiously. Dru used to have these sudden mood swings.

'I wasted all that sympathy on you! And tears, and – and - righteous indignation. You gave me all that 'this girl' stuff, and then it turns out it's just you, being too stubborn and too - dumb to know when you can't win. As if she could ever love you.'

Her voice is cracking with bitterness and he doesn't know why. He looks down at his hands on the table. He was unprepared for this. No backhanders ready.

'She could,' he says in a low voice. 'She just won't.'

Anya leans forward. Her eyes are bright and seem further apart than usual.

'She. Can't.' He can feel her breath.

Words pour out of her, harsh but still deliberate, still precise.

'Who do you think you are, Spike? You're not human, you're nothing - you're a lame demon walking around in a stolen body.'

Her voice is rising.

'You think you're cool? You're embarrassing. All your little comments, they're not clever, they're inappropriate and rude. They're meant to show that you're too smart to care about stuff, but they don't. All they show is that you don't belong. You're trash. You're just a cute piece of demon ass, good enough to _screw_ but not to -'

She stops. She's been yelling. Spike's looking at her, and she sees only concern in his face, his chagrin wiped away by alarm.

His shock brings her back to herself and she begins to cry, loudly and chokily, flinging her head and arms down onto her books. This relieves Spike, who knows what to do with crying girls. He slides off his chair, puts both arms round her, kisses her, wipes her face with his sleeve, calls her darling and pet until she stops.

He sits back down and she sniffs. There's a pause and then Anya props her head on her hand and gives him a weak smile. There's mascara on her cheeks. 'Aside from that,' she says, 'It's nice you stopped by.'

He smiles sideways up at her, awkward after the sudden explosion of tension. It's too like that other aftermath in this room, on this table, only all the merchandise is intact.

Anya takes a neatly folded Kleenex from her purse and wipes her nose. Spike's about to offer her his flask when they hear a voice:

'Hey, come on, the light's on – we'll get you some water.'

It's Xander. The door handle turns.

Anya freezes, still clutching her tissue. Spike stands up, glances towards the back room. She stops him.

'No time,' she whispers sharply, and pushes him behind the counter and under it.

Just a skeleton in another Scooby closet, he thinks. He'd been fooled by her fury, but she's craven at heart; she'll drop all the tough girl stuff for the smell of a chance to get back her man.

The pulse at Anya's throat is fluttering like a canary in distress while she watches the door open. Spike, under the counter like the contraband commodity he is, watches just as intently.

Xander comes in slowly, one arm around Dawn, who looks pale and boneless. When he sees Anya he looks down at his toes.

'Hey,' he says. Dawn doesn't look like she can speak. 'We - uh - we were just walking, and Dawn isn't feeling too good, so - I thought, maybe, some water...'

Nothing clever. Barely anything coherent.

Anya looks at Dawn, half-leaning on Xander's arm.

'Are you ok?' she asks. 'Are you going to vomit?'

'I don't think so,' says Dawn, sounding frail and unsure. Xander sits her down at the table and Anya passes her a bottle of water from her bag, unscrewing the lid for her first. It's disconcerting to have them show up together, shaken like this. Two smart talkers denuded of their armour.

Silence falls as Dawn sips. Spike, watching from the shadows, sees Anya twitching around the table, closing the books, shifting jars and candles and some things that look like pickled onions but probably aren't.

'I'm ok,' Dawn reassures her, still in a small voice. 'I'm not going to barf on your stuff.'

Anya jumps. 'Right. Great. So - how come you got sick? Where have you been? Did you have drugs?'

Xander's still staring at the floor. 'I was just picking her up from a party,' he says. 'No drugs.' He looks at Dawn suddenly. 'Right?'

'Yes!' says Dawn. 'No drugs, no alcohol, no magic, nothing bad. I forgot to have dinner, I guess. I'll have something when I get home.'

Anya looks at Xander. 'Should we call Buffy?' she asks.

He takes a long time to answer.

During the grilling pause that follows, Spike becomes aware of the peculiar implications of his lurking presence on the margins of this scene: invisible, silent, palpable. He can hear himself in Anya's tense, agonised tones, in Xander's silence. The things the three of them said the last time they were all within earshot of each other hang in the air. Xander, particularly, seems to be finding it hard to manoeuvre round them. In the end he says,

'She's at work. I haven't really seen her. I mean - she's been really tired.'

'How are you?' Anya asks.

'Fine. Great.' He looks uncomfortable, and keeps glancing at the door, but Dawn still looks too shivery to be moved.

'Yeah, you look great,' says Anya, sharply. His colour is dirty margarine; his face seems to have sagged and bagged away from the bone; his dark eyes are murky, and the straight lines of back and shoulders he's been growing into are broken. Gravity's winning, pulling him down.

Spike, looking at him, feels a shock of pain that is almost entirely physical. This rapid leaking of vitality jars him. Never mind that he'd rather have a beating than a conversation with Xander; only, last week he'd been vivid and powerful, in a casual, carpenterly way, and now he looks like scrap.

Anya, having reached deadlock with Xander's bleak and evasive gaze, turns to Dawn. 'You want some cookies?' she says kindly. 'They'll raise your energy levels.'

Dawn smiles, 'No thanks. Don't really feel up to all that chewing.'

'Well - I've got some milk in the back. Or you could have juice.' Dawn accepts juice, and Xander and Spike both wonder how much time Anya's been spending here.

'Feel ready to try heading yet, Dawnster?' Xander asks, aiming half-heartedly at his usual bantering style.

'Where's your car?' Anya asks.

'Uh - Willow's got it. Late night grocery shopping. She said she'd pick up some stuff for me too. And then Buffy called, said she had to work late, and Dawn and I got stuck riding Shank's pony.'

Once he's able to form the words, he keeps them coming. He's keeping them linked by a neutral buzz of unloaded sound.

But Spike knows by instinct what Anya hears: how quickly she's become dispensable, how effortlessly the Scoobies have closed ranks, filling the gap where she'd been. Her face hardens.

'That's neat,' she says, coldly. 'But who's stayed home to sit at the window with the boiling oil?'

Xander visibly sways.

'No – uh, hey,' he stutters. 'Ahn - I'm sorry.'

'Sorry for what? Sorry you settled? Sorry you wasted time making do, when you could've gotten in a few extra years of drooling over Buffy?'

Spike steals a look at Dawn. She's got a bit more colour now, but she's very still, leaning her cheek on her hand, staring down at the table. She shouldn't hear this, he thinks.

'Don't talk about Buffy,' Xander says, jaggedly.

Anya looks like she's been hit, like she's damn well going to hit back. Spike shuts his eyes and leans his head back against the counter. If she's going to take it out of Buffy, using coarse language and in front of Dawn, they'll just have to deal with the scarring later.

'Don't talk about her? In case I verbally transmit some vampire-screwing cooties she doesn't already have? I probably caught it from her, Xander! If anyone - '

'Don't! Stop it!' Dawn stands up, knocking a jar of marbles off the table. It smashes and they bounce. Three visible and one hidden pair of eyes watch them. Dawn, still weak from her giddy fit, begins to cry.

'Please. Don't yell anymore. He said he was sorry. He's not even talking to Buffy, not properly. I just wish everything would get back to normal. Can't you just make it up?' crying quietly, harder and harder, 'I wish you could just make it up.'

Xander looks ashamed. 'Hey, Dawn. Come on, we'll get you home. We're ok. We can finish this another time, right Anya?'

But Anya is turning away. How can she resist this? It's what she wishes too. Sighing, she lets the ropes and whorls of her other face push through her delicate, tearstained skin. The pendant, hidden, begins to glow through her sweater.

But although her face is shielded, Dawn, sitting at the table, sees the glow, and guesses what it means - she's been up close and personal with one before. Quick as a flash she's across the room, grasping Anya's arm, somehow ripping the chain and snatching the necklace. Anya screams and clutches at it, but Dawn holds it behind her and screams back.

Xander crosses the room in one step, shooting an arm out in front of Dawn, pushing her backwards. It's faster than he's moved in days. He stands with his arm around Dawn, staring.

The veins sink and fade. Anya turns her human face into her hand and sobs, half-turned away from him.

Without a word he turns towards the door, guiding Dawn, his haggard face blank. But as they reach the threshold he turns again, takes the jewel from where it lies in Dawn's hand, and hurls it violently and wordlessly across the room, where it smacks a carving and falls. Then the door swings and they're really gone.

Anya stands where he left her, racked with low, rapid sobs. She doesn't move when Spike stands up creakily from behind the counter, but when he crosses the room to pick up the pendant, she gasps and turns. She looks at him like she's forgotten where she is, like something's wrong but she can't remember what. Buffy looked at him like that once, after whisking him like white of egg to the soft peak stage. Drowned, guilty, lost eyes.

Murderer's eyes.

He steps towards her. 'Yeah,' he says in a dry voice, banging the pendant down on the table. 'I'm the idiot round here.'

Anya lies in bed, thinking of Spike. Thinking about him in much the same way as she'd slept with him - for his anaesthetic properties. Last night, after the scene in the Magic Box, he'd treated her kindly. That is, he'd called her a life-wrecking insane bloody cow (he'd also called D'Hoffryn an arse-faced creeping beardy-weirdy and a scavenging pimp); but he'd waited while she'd swept and closed up the shop, walked her home, and given her all of what was left in his flask before he'd left. And half-out the door he'd stopped, given her a stern look and said, 'Don't go taking everything in the medicine cabinet, now.'

The thoughts that are beating at the edge of her consciousness are of Xander. What she's trying not to hear is her own voice saying 'It's over. You screwed up.'

He's everything to her. All her reasons for being human.

He'd said, 'I plan to live a long and silly life, and I'm not interested in doing that without you around.'

Hadn't he meant it? Had he changed his mind?

She thinks of all the times he's reminded her, about taking things too literally. Maybe he never knew how literally she'd agreed with him, won't know how much more literally she agrees with him now. Life's never seemed so long, or so silly, or so wholly uninteresting as it does today.

So she thinks of Spike, floats Spike thoughts through her mind and concentrates on them, like you concentrate on the tune you hum with your fingers in your ears to drown out unpleasant stories or the sound of Harrison Ford trying to drown Michelle Pfeiffer. Or the frightening part of 'Bambi', the bit with Thumper.

It's late, she thinks drearily. If the shop doesn't open punctually, we may lose walk-in trade.

She gets up to dress, leaving symmetrical tear stains on her pillow.

Spoilers: up to 'Entropy' - it branches off after that.

Summary: The beginning of a Spike story that picks up after he and Anya you know what. Might turn out S/A. Spike's nearly been caught by Xander, getting cosy with Anya again, found out she's gone back to her veiny lifestyle, and is thinking things through, dead confused...

Cold Comfort

Set after 'Entropy' (Buffy Season 6)

Chapter Two

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	2. Chapter Two

Cold Comfort

Set after 'Entropy' (Buffy Season 6)

Chapter Two

Spike spends the night stalking Buffy.

He can't help it; it's a compulsive response to pressure.

After he shuts the door on Anya he's not angry any more, and he needs something to concentrate on. So he lets his steps fall into their favourite path.

At first he thinks of Anya, not sure why he'd been so pissed off. No skin off his nose if she's rejoined the hordes of hell, or so he tells himself. Really, he knows what it is, why he minds: she's his excuse.

Two creatures from Hell; leave one soulless and make the other human. The first is pre-destined to screw everything up the backside; the second has a good chance of conducting a functional life and keeping her fella.

Her reversion to type brings him up against it: animal, vegetable or mineral, he wouldn't know when to stop. Wouldn't be able to if he did know.

He gets flashbacks. That morning after the house had fallen in, unnoticed. Surely he'd known he'd get a kick in the head for that indelicate comment about the only thing better than killing a slayer? If he'd kept it shut then; if he hadn't kicked her out when she was invisible, hadn't pushed her to the limits, times without number, like he was being paid for it by the hour - raked out her secrets, the ones that made her flinch, and shoved them under her pretty nose -

Then what? He'd be undead Riley, clumsily skirting round the certain knowledge that she wasn't his.

He creeps up to her back porch, looking into the kitchen window. Willow and Tara are in there, cutting sandwiches. The window's slightly open, but he can't hear much of what they're saying. Doesn't want to anyway. They look kind of gooey.

Buffy comes in, banging the door.

She's tying up her hair, and asks Willow something. He thinks it's 'Ooh - how come we're all sandwichey tonight?' Something like that - he can tell by her inflexions, by the determined perkiness in her face and posture.

Last time he saw her she hadn't been up to mutilating nouns.

He watches her eat sandwiches. He can hear the rise and fall of her voice, imagines her flirtily skewering her words, crumbling grammar and conventional usage, scrambling for sense in the wreck. ('What's up? You're all bad-moody?' he hears in his head). Cute, helpless Buffy. No power here. No daddy, no way could I crush you to rubble without even trying. Wiggins much?

He's seen her do this so many times. He'd be making her gasp, or she'd be making him bleed - and at the first hint of an interruption she'd grow a Scooby face, cover herself in cheap, cheerleader glamour. Prettiest girl in school.

But it's been a long time since he's seen her slip into character this completely. Not in this life, he thinks. There are shadows in her face that give her extra years, but she looks more relaxed, more heart-whole in this Buffy-the-Prom-Queen skin than she has for months.

Then suddenly he knows why. It's because of him.

For the first time since she's been back he's seeing her when she knows for sure she won't be coming to him in the night. Won't be treading that well-patrolled stretch around his crypt, dangling herself until he snatches. Forcing his hand, cuing him to batter her with spiky, Spikey words, persuade her with roughly coaxing, eloquent hands, into submission. Victorious, breathy, dominant submission.

She's wiping her chin with a napkin: eyelids cast down, mouth curling up - embarrassed to be jam-covered in front of her friends. Tara, who's all but seen her clamber from the grave. Willow, who's had blood on her own hands before.

What would he do with her, if she was his?

His most secret dreams of Buffy are dark and exotic, coloured by the macabre chic of his life with Angelus, the hectic extravagance of life with Dru. And, without his knowing it, by the lurid fairy tales of his human childhood - the Arabian Nights, and stories of pirates.

He'd keep her in a castle, in a tower, away from everyone. He'd bring her the hearts of virgins on a golden plate.

Spike leans back against his tree and sighs. He knows she wouldn't be interested in virgin's hearts. Wouldn't want stolen goblets brimming with the rich blood of ice-cream-fed schoolgirls. Or the bronze knife of the Czech princess, with its blunted blade and its handle carved with serpents. Wouldn't want any of the precious, hard-won things he's brought Dru. He'd blunted the blade for her himself, to make the pain last longer.

Willow's reaching out, takes the napkin from Buffy's hand, gets the last of the jam.

Buffy smiles, rolling her eyes, and making some cute, inaudible crack. Tara, watching, grins at her, says something and makes a vampire face, at which Willow raises one eyebrow. He can hear Buffy's grossed out noise through the window.

This is what he's wanted to take her away from, to take away from her. He thinks of her fingernails in his neck, her voice gasping in his ear. 'Bite me. No. Properly. Bite me hard.' Throatily, 'Spike, please.'

He'd been furious the first time she'd done that - what if he'd lost control? - and then almost touched. Was she showing him how, after all, she does trust him?

It wasn't, he realizes now, anything to do with trust. It was to do with power. He was a legend, he was in the books; he made the monsters scream. He'd bitten two slayers to death. And she could do anything with him. This was just another display, pushing him to the edge, showing off what she'd made of him. She lay in his arms, begging him to bleed her, all restraint gone; knowing that he could, knowing absolutely that he wouldn't.

And when she'd got her boost she'd go, no hanging about. Useless to think about what he'd bring her - she wasn't interested in anything he wanted to give her, only in things she could take from him. Rapacious. A robber bride.

He covers his face with his hands. What is he doing? He'll steal a car, black out the windows, hit the road. Catch up with Dru, with Harmony, with some human who's not picky about morals or daylight. Plenty of those around. He'll get work in the demon world - he's done jobs for Willy before, Willy'll help him out with contacts. Or he can steal stuff - blood, money, jewellery. Concrete, dispensable things. He's not going to hang around any longer, stealing from Buffy in substanceless, vital ways he can't control.

He doesn't know how long he sits there, but when he looks up at the window, it's dark and empty. They've gone to bed. He rises to leave, but as he does, he hears the door bang. Hears a few steps, then a sniff.


	3. Chapter Three

Cold Comfort

Set after 'Entropy' (Buffy Season 6)

Chapter Three

'Spike?'

It's Xander, and his voice is harsh. Spike leans more closely back into the shadow of his tree. Xander's stalking the darkened garden, and even to a vampire who could fight back without blowing a fuse, he'd look menacing.

'Spike,' he says again, still sniffing the air. Spike hastily stubs out his thirteenth cigarette.

'It's starting to _amaze_ me how much you don't know when the dead lie down,' Xander says, looking behind trees. His tone is almost chatty, and Spike sincerely hopes he hasn't actually gone mad. Before that night at the Magic Box, only Scooby he's ever been remotely afraid of, even for a second, is Willow. But he hasn't forgotten the feel of that axe at his throat. (Hasn't forgotten Buffy either, lightning-quick, pulling Xander away. For a palpitating second he'd thought it was the frenzied concern of a woman for her lover. Now he thinks bitterly, frenzied concern of a dog for its bone.

There's a swish of leaves and they're face to face.

They stare at each other. Xander breaks first. He dives for Spike's neck, fumbling in his pocket for a stake. Spike sees, hits him in the jaw quickly, reels backwards with the pain. Xander draws back to knock him out, but Spike catches him first, slamming him against the tree with one hand, clutching his own temples with the other.

'Not tonight, darling,' he breathes through set teeth. 'I've got a headache.'

His adrenaline's up for the first time in days, but Xander's gone limp, hanging his head forward, the anger in his eyes glazed over.

Spike feels a badly-timed and unprecedented stab of pity. No love lost between them, but still Xander's the life and breath of normal to him - not always good, not always brave, but always there, with something to say. He drops his arm.

'Xander. Here. I'm sorry.'

Xander makes a noise that could be a laugh or could be a choke. Or he could be starting to be sick.

'You're sorry all right,' he says. 'Soulless piece of shit.'

There's no smart answer to that one, so Spike says 'Fuck you,' and turns to walk away. But as he does he hears Xander's voice: it sounds strangled, as though he doesn't want to speak but can't contain the words.

'She went back to D'Hoffryn because of what you did.'

Spike stops in his tracks.

'Because of what _I_ did?' he says. 'Personally, I think ripping her heart out in public and leaving her to mop up the mess, hits an ex-demon a little harder than givin' her a little undead sugar, don't you?'

Xander winces, possibly at the thought of his disastrous wedding day, but Spike's always sensitive to the thought that humans find him disgusting, and snaps back.

'Oh right. Let's all go 'ew' at the thought of a bit of vampire action. You make me vomit. You think the reason you can't forgive her is that I don't have a soul? Bollocks it is.' His tone becomes icily deliberate: 'You don't like vampires because Buffy gets off on them. You just can't stand it that she's only hot if a guy's cold.'

Xander turns his head away sharply, moves to walk off, but Spike catches at him.

'You loved it when that GI dolly was her baby, didn't you?' he says. His eyes are gleaming, he's getting back his power to wound. 'You thought he was Super-Xander. Just you, all puffed up with combats and government-issue steroids.' He's inching towards Xander, a sing-song note creeping into his voice.

'You still think it too, don't you - if you eat up your greens and remember to wash behind your ears you'll grow up big and strong like him, and maybe you'll be good enough for her someday. What do you think Anya was doing with me? Pleasure-cruising? She was trying to forget -'

But he's pushed it too far. Xander hits him hard, into the ground. His black eyes are snapping, the whitened, grief-loosened skin of his face trembles. He looks madder than Spike's ever seen him.

'She's not like you!' he says fiercely. 'Is that what you think? You're a killer. She's - ' he gulps. He doesn't know what she is anymore. 'She's -whatever she is, she's a good person.'

He steps back, tears in his eyes, and walks away, stumbling from the shakiness of despair and violence on a long-empty stomach.

Spike's still on the ground, eyes closed. A good person. Cute. Happy endings for the geek patrol, then. Mickey gets Minnie. He gets to his feet. That's all, folks.

Buffy's awake. She lies in bed, listening to the yelling in the garden. She can't hear the words, not really.

She hears Spike's voice in her head, again and again.

''S good enough for Buffy,' with that choke in the middle. She can see the contempt in his face. He knows what she knows. She should have been the one to say that.

But she didn't. She let all the accusations pour by, abandoned Anya to Xander's disgust when she could have defended her.

_You had sex with that. You let that evil soulless thing touch you. First body you could find, dead or alive.  
_  
If the words fit Anya, they fit her too, and she'd been snivellingly afraid of losing Xander's love. Worship. Couldn't bear him to look at her and feel sick.

So she'd kept quiet, let him think Anya was some ravening underworld slut, too degenerate even to stop and check for a pulse.

She turns her face into her pillow, waves of sad, choky, little sobs breaking out of her. She isn't anyone's sweet, brave Buffy, not any more.

'Why can't you just get off my back?'

Dawn's using the voice in which she used to say 'Mo-om! She's pulling my hair-air!'

'I can if you do what you're told,' says Buffy, hands on hips. Flashback to her mom, the day Buffy wanted to wear her Mr Tickle pyjamas on the third grade class trip. She sighs.

'I don't have time for this. Tara's going to be here any minute to do a locator spell. This whole Nerd-Mafia thing could be way more serious than we thought, and if we don't find Warren soon -'

'Right. The world's going to end if I don't eat that gross doublemeat gastroenteritis-burger right this second. How come you're making this into such a big deal?'

'Dawn, last night I asked Xander to pick you up from your party, and the next thing I know he's carrying you in through that door. You said it was because you skipped dinner; therefore you are not going to skip dinner again tonight. And there's no gastroenteritis. When did you get so picky anyway? Two years ago this was your favourite dinner.'

'Two years ago I didn't exist. Not my fault if those monks programmed sleazy diner taste into my brain.'

'Don't talk like that,' says Buffy sharply. She hates it when Dawn carelessly throws up the things she's worked so hard to forget. She's forgotten that not long ago she had Giles to look grey-faced and reproving when she threw her own smart-mouthed, ruthless pebbles.

'Whatever,' says Dawn, getting up from the table. 'I'm going to Janice's.'

'Fine,' says Buffy shortly. 'Go hang out in Pleasantville. I hope they're having ooky left-over pot-roast.'

Dawn slams the door.

Buffy takes Dawn's reheated doublemeat burger over to the sink. Janice's mom has been really great, having Dawn over such a lot. Some days she wishes Janice's mom would fall into a vat of her delicious homemade salsa dip.

She looks out of the window, caught by one of those fits of the blues you get after a fight. After a week of fights that have brought the world crashing down, when there's nothing to pick you up again because nothing's your own.

Last night, long after the voices outside her window had stopped, she'd thought she heard the noise of a lighter.

'Buffy? What's the matter?'

She looks round. It's Tara, with Willow following her. She looks concerned.

'Huh? The matter with what?'

'Oh - no. You were just - staring at the tree, and I thought... but everything's ok?'

''I'm fine. The tree's - fine. Did you get the stuff?'

Tara nods. 'We have everything we need right here.' She turns to Willow. 'Are you - sure you should watch?'

Buffy looks alarmed. She looks from one witch to the other. 'Watch as in watch-the-magic watch?'

Willow's eyes are bright - she's almost bobbing up and down on her toes. Buffy thinks, I haven't seen her do that since Miss Calendar's class. Tara's looking down as she lays out spell ingredients on the table.

Willow says, 'Buffy, this thing with Warren could be really big. If things get bad, I want to be able to help. No touching, I promise - I just want to keep in the picture.' Her face looks serious. 'You might need me.'


	4. Chapter Four

Cold Comfort

Set after 'Entropy' (Buffy Season 6)

Chapter Four

Spike can't leave.

He's all set up. Called in his gambling debts, said goodbye to Clem. Got the address of Willy's sister's ex-boyfriend who's had three Fyarl raids in his hotel in St Hilda's Lake. Got a litre of single malt and a litre of butcher's best in a brown paper bag.

Hasn't got the nerve to leave Sunnydale.

He wants to, all right. He's desperate to, but he's being pulled back.

Hard to know why, hard to know what he'd be leaving exactly.He'd thought he owned this town. Those first two confident steps he'd taken onto Sunnydale soil, they echo in his head: insulting, invincible. Irrevocable.

The first time he'd fought her, he'd said, 'As a personal favour to you, I'll make it quick. Won't hurt a bit.' She'd said, 'No, Spike. This is going to hurt a lot.'

He's been fighting her ever since, though everything's changed: territory, weapons, allies - nothing constant but the fight itself. And now that's over, and she's won.

Won by walking away. She'd admitted he was right, and ignored it, pretended not to notice. A gambit any big sister knows: I'm not playing any more. One that she could have used any day of the last three years.

She knows he's right, she needs him badly. His vision isn't blinkered by _right_ or _nice_ or _safe_ - doesn't need to be: what does he need to be afraid of, already dead, already knows Santa isn't coming. She trusts him to be right, trusts him to know when the Emperor is naked, and to say so.

She knows he's right, he's seen it in her face, seen a creeping softness darken her eyes to sparkless pools.

But she'd fought against it, fought dirty, cut the ground from under his feet. How could he retaliate when her only violence was against herself? She's given her life a Spikectomy, a lobotomy of the senses. He'd just been helping her out, that night outside the Magic Box, making the final cut himself. Obliging to the last.

He knows just how she'd play it, if he left. She'd get over him like he was measles, forget she'd ever known him. No-one can shut down like Buffy in the face of an unpalatable truth. She wouldn't see that the emperor was naked if he was giving her a lap dance.

Maybe she'd spare him a wistful glance, alone in her room, a single pearly tear. Is that why he's still here? Can't face being a prop in a slushy rewrite?

He thinks about how close he'd been to killing her, that first time, stepping into the Master's shoes. What has Sunnydale ever been to him but nauseating disappointment? The Slayer, the Gem of Amarrah, Dru recovered to health - they've all slipped through his fingers.

So hit the road Jack. Why's he still here?

Is it because he's used to it?

Used to sleeping in a bed, his own place. His crypt - he thinks about how it's changed since he moved in. It's still a vampire's lair, but now it looks less like that of a vampire who rooms with a thriving rag-and-bone-man, more like that of one who's gone all out to impress the girls.

Used to human company? Hostile and infrequent human company, sure - but is that it, is it people he doesn't want to leave behind? People whose lives he's saved, though he's hated them. People who've saved his life, reluctantly. Who have had the grace, occasionally, to ignore the emptiness of his threats, although he's frightened them for real before.

Who have got used to him thinking up new ways to shake their world. Good forgetters, children of the Hellmouth.

No-one's going to forgive him this last one. No-one's going to push in his door saying 'Spike, I need your help', or 'Know anything about a diamond-eating frost- monster?'

He's burned his bridges. Time to pack his trunk and say goodbye to the circus.

That's when he hears a bang, and looks up to see Anya standing there, looking tense.

He stands up in surprise, and they stare at each other for a moment. He's about to speak, when there's a flurry of fur, and something fluffy and hissing and grey somersaults through the air and lands on Anya's feet.

She screams and backs away, clinging to the doorframe. Damn, thinks Spike. That sure cuts a dash. Hyperactive snack food scares the lady into fits before you get your fat face round hello.

'What the hell is that?' she gasps. She's not just startled, she's cowering.

Great. Nice that she trusts him not to have some obscure design on her life after all that's happened. What does she think it is, some cunningly disguised hairy hand-grenade?

By this time the interruption is rolling contentedly on the floor between them, three-quarters of a rat trailing out of its mouth. Anya relaxes.

'Sorry,' she says, hand on heart, 'I thought it was a rabbit.'

He narrows his eyes at her, as if he suspects she's accusing him of taking unmentionable liberties with Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail.

'No,' he says. 'It's a kitten.'

'That's not a kitten.'

Spike throws a frustrated glance at the ceiling. He's had a few instant-gratification daydreams about what would happen if he saw Anya again, and this wasn't it.

'Right,' he says. 'It's my mother-in-law. I get confused. Was there something?'

Anya goes on as if she hasn't heard him.

'That's a cat. Kittens are smaller. And not as sharp.' She rubs her shin.

This is a touchy subject for Spike.

'Just so happens I haven't got round to eating this one yet,' he says defensively. 'Had a lot of luck lately. Didn't want to give myself indigestion, did I? Besides, it's a good mouser. And it keeps my feet warm at night.'

Anya smiles and perches on a coffin.

'I know your blood doesn't circulate, Spike,' she says kindly. 'You don't have to feel ashamed because you own a pet.'

He starts to protest at that, but she carries on brightly,

'It's attractive for a feline. What do you call it?'

'I call it dinner,' he snaps. She looks a little crushed by his tone, and he sighs. Lights a cigarette and gestures her to his chair. She sits down, neatly avoiding treading on Dinner.

'Drink?' he offers. She nods.

He has two diet cokes in his 'fridge, he knows. He just doesn't want to admit what they're doing there. He gets a soda out and hands it to her. It's warmish, because he's unplugged the 'fridge, ready for flight.

'So how d'you find me?' he asks. It's occurred to him that there aren't many people in Sunnydale that it's safe to ask where he lives. She looks blank.

'I know some people,' she says.

Old links, he supposes. Anyanka had clout.

She shifts uncomfortably in her chair.

'I just wanted to say thank you,' she says. 'For the other night. And to explain.'

Spike hopes she means the night of the argument, not that other other night. He doesn't think he can face an Open University lecture on that dimly-lit, incoherent hour in the shop.

'D'Hoffryn - he- after the…' Her hands are twisting in her lap. She claps them firmly onto her knee and starts again. 'He offered me my powers back, and I refused, I did. I'd spent all this time and effort learning to be human, I didn't want all that to be wasted. So I said no. But then he offered me a deal - my pendant back for a month, no strings. To help me decide.' More softly, 'It seemed like a bargain.'

He can hear the apology in her tone, but he's genuinely nonplussed. She's looking at him now; he's never seen quite how beseeching her usually bright eyes can look, half-drowned. What's she expecting? A beating, a benediction? A message to the Scoobies?

'That's grand,' he says. 'Glad it wasn't buy one, get one free. But if you're hoping I can put in a good word for you with the Brady Bunch, I'm afraid they're not returning my calls.'

She looks puzzled, and for a moment he thinks Xander's lessons have neglected popular culture. But then her brow clears.

'No,' she says. 'I just wanted you to know. You seemed kind of unimpressed - you know, by the whole life-wrecking-insane-bloody-cow deal.'

She's looking down, and can't see his eyes on her. She doesn't know he's been starving for human contact, for thoughts that aren't about Buffy. She doesn't know how long it's been since anyone's cared whether he's impressed, and said so. She looks up, and says with a watery smile.

'I don't think the Brady Bunch would be interested anyway. They're not really returning my calls either.'

Spike thinks of Xander's glazed eyes suddenly filling with tears, of his garbled, baffled stand of loyalty.

She doesn't know, he thinks. Poor little bit. He catches this surge of soppiness before it gets any worse, but he's left feeling more altruistic than a vampire ought to feel. He'll tell her, he thinks, and likes the idea of easing some of the cramping grief he can see in the tensed lines of her body. It gives him a rush, a little like the one he got a hundred and eighteen years ago from eating his old head-master. It's a mini-revelation - he'd thought good guys relied on an inflated sense of their own porridge-eating, vest-wearing virtue for kicks; never realized being nice could make you feel this good.

Anya's looking around, taking in the coat he's wearing, the packed lunch in the pocket, the unplugged 'fridge.

'Are you - going someplace?' she asks. He can tell her casualness is feigned, and his heart gives a dry leap. She cares. All thoughts of orchestrating a happy ending for her and Xander leapfrog each other out of his mind. He leans forward in his seat, looking at her; his hand almost touching her, caressing the air around her knee.

'Come for the ride?' he says.


	5. Chapter Five

Cold Comfort

Set after 'Entropy' (Buffy Season 6)

Chapter Five

'Anya?' he says. 'Come with me.'

She looks up at him. 'When?' she says.

'Soon's you like. Now.'

If he were more sure of her response he'd kiss her now, to persuade her. But he doesn't know if she'd smack him in the head, kick the cat and run; or slip her arms round his neck, pull him close, melt like butter.

Then, he likes that in a girl.

'Come on,' his voice is low, his eyes are glowing.

There's a tense beat, like they're both watching the same tightrope-walker; and then she turns her head away, dropping his gaze. The tightrope-walker starts, sways, and plummets.

'What about the shop?' she says.

There's no change in her tone, but she's slumped a little. Come down to earth. He looks at her for a few more seconds.

'Right then,' he says.

She stands up, looks around, as if for clothes she hasn't shed, and moves towards the door. Her hand on the handle, she turns.

'Not coming back, ever?' she says.

He takes a step towards her, and then another, and then he's leaning over her, looking into her eyes. Not touching her by so much as a hair.

'You could make a sign for the door,' he suggests in a low voice.

'Gone to catch the post: back in five years.'

'Someone could fill in. Who's been helping you?'

'Halfrek.'

'Give her a rise. Say you'll bring her back some candy and a still-beating heart.'

She drops her eyes. 'I thought you weren't coming back.'

'I haven't made up my mind yet.' He hopes this sounds suggestive.

She wavers, then smiles luminously. 'I'll go find Hallie,' she says.

He opens the door a crack, and peers out.

'Nearly dusk. I'll go pick up a car. The car, my car. No stealing-'

She doesn't question it.

'You can pick me up in front of the shop. Give me an hour.' Now it's decided, she sounds business-like, and he nods. Before she leaves, she turns again.

'Spike.'

He pauses in the act of lighting up.

'On our trip. There's not going to be any - sexual intercourse.'

He raises his eyebrows.

'Right. Have to think of something else to do while we wait for the lights to change, then,' he says, and immediately wishes he hadn't.

She gives him a taut smile.

'Well. Just wanted to get that straight.'

Gotta like the bollocks on her though, he thinks as the door closes behind her. How many girls, you ask them to leave town with you, first thing they say is 'when?'

He sighs as he starts gathering his things together. He's not sure what he's doing. This journey had been his lone, desperate flight, his brave attempt to get out of Buffy's patch, out of her hair, out of her reach. Why's he turning it into Bonnie and Clyde?

Did Lady Macbeth stipulate 'no sexual intercourse'? Had Judith hung a sign in the shop before she decapitated Holofernes? Anya may be a knock-out and a tough cookie, but he's not sure she's going to fit in with his view of things.

Still - the sheer stupidity of the plan is exhilarating. He carts a giant roll of Bacofoil out of a sarcophagus and starts hacking it into the shape of a windscreen.

'I think it's worse than that,' says Tara, bending over the results of her spell. 'I think they're robots.'

Willow peers down where Tara's finger's pointing.

'Where?' she says. 'Are you sure? I thought those were trees.'

'No, look, here. This criss-cross pattern? It repeats itself, a whole lot of times.'

Buffy doesn't say anything. She'd like to. She'd like to dazzle the others with something fierily creative, and at the same time impressively well-researched. But after staring at the marks on Tara's parchment for nearly an hour, all they look like to her is the prints of a heavy-drinking gerbil trying to teach his three-legged girlfriend the rumba. She decides to keep that one under her hat.

'Could Warren do that, Buffy?' Tara asks, looking up at her. 'Build a whole big bunch of robots in such a short time?'

Buffy starts. 'I guess so. He seemed to be churning them out pretty fast last year.'

'But why would he want to?' says Willow. 'I mean, he had big plans - why would he want to go back to the sex-bot sweat-shop? That was hard to say.'

Tara frowns. 'That bot you fought last year, Buffy - she was pretty strong, wasn't she?'

'Darn right!' says Willow, before Buffy can answer. 'Don't you remember at that party, when she threw Sp - s-stuff around?' Stick my big fat foot in it, she thinks. No-one's mentioned Spike or Anya to Buffy since that night - just assumed the sound of their names would flick on the raw.

Tara gives Willow a rueful half-smile. Half for effort thinks Willow, because Buffy's suddenly lost to them, staring at the table, her eyes swimming. Her face looks like it's about to crack; it's horribly out of shape - not in a he-took-my-tru-u-uck sort of way: in a grown- up, distraught, having a bad nervous breakdown sort of way.

She has no idea why she's losing control this badly. She's always so good at blanketing over bad thoughts; it's a slayer function, she relies on it. Only now there aren't any thoughts at all - just a sick, hot feeling that sweeps her if someone says Spike, making everything ripple, like heat-shimmer.

Tara pretends nothing's wrong. It's a skill she didn't have before she came to Sunnydale.

'Well,' she says, 'I don't know what Warren's plan is, but I'm guessing an army of super-strong mechanical love-bunnies isn't going to make it any easier to deal with.' She takes a deep breath. 'We need someone to go find out what he's up to -'

Buffy's face clears a little. 'You guys stay here,' she says. 'I ...uh... I have ways of making nerds talk.'

'Buffy - are you sure that's such a good idea?' asks Tara.

Buffy leaves a pause. Banging the crap out of people is a reflex to her, not an idea.

Tara starts to stammer. She knows what she wants to say. 'I m-mean, Warren- knows you're not- not exactly a fan. And those robots - they're pretty strong.' She doesn't say, you'd be instant mash. 'I - I think we need someone who can go undercover, someone Warren won't s-suspect.'

She falters. She can feel Willow trying to read her mind - in the figurative sense, she hopes. She didn't like letting her watch the spell, can't help the shivers she gets when she thinks how readily, how gladly she once let Willow walk around inside her thoughts, speak silently, straight into her brain.

She tries again, and her voice comes out clear.

'I think we need Spike,' she says.

There's silence. Tara begins to sweat.

'I know it's not ideal,' she says, 'I mean, I know no-one feels like seeing him right now. But he doesn't have any good-guy reputation weighing him down, and we know he can handle himself. Plus, he's-' she swallows, 'he's done... business with Warren before. We just - we need-'

Buffy stands up suddenly. 'I'll go ask him,' she says. 'Get it over with.'

Willow looks alarmed. 'Are you sure you wouldn't like someone else to go?' She looks at Tara nervously.

Tara stands and puts a hand on Buffy's arm. 'I know he hurt you, a lot -' she begins.

The door clicks open softly. It's Dawn.

'Who hurt who?' she says, looking from Tara to Buffy. And then, 'Oh.'

Buffy picks up her coat. 'I better go,' she says.

'Where're you going?' asks Dawn, but the door's slipping shut already.

Tara looks flustered. 'Uh - we think Warren's cooking up some trouble,' she says. 'Buffy just went to see if she could find out some more about it.'

'Right,' says Dawn. 'And where do babies come from?' It doesn't come out defiant, but withered and plaintive. Tara looks concerned.

'Dawn, are you sick? You look kind of peaky. Are you sleeping ok? Maybe you should get an early night.'

'I'm sleeping fine,' says Dawn fractiously. She's been having nightmares, mainly about monks, but she doesn't want to think about that. Willow jumps up,

'I'll fix you some hot chocolate, Dawnie,' she suggests. 'Maybe a boost of calorific goodness is what you need.'

'That's a great idea,' Tara start gathering up her jars of herbs and ointments. 'I'll just move this stuff out the way, and then you can come sit down, ok?'

There's no answer, and both girls turn in time to see Dawn close her eyes and buckle against the wall; but not in time to catch her as she slides gracelessly to the floor.

Buffy takes the walk to Spike's in tearing strides, keeping pace with the beating in her head. She hardly knows what she's doing. She's out of control, her mind, her depth.

As she gets nearer her blood cools. Her feet too; she slows down.

What's he going to think of her, turning up like this, after everything?

What must the others have thought? That she'd jumped at the chance to chase him up, snapped at the excuse like a lizard at a bluebottle. She had.

She knew it would hurt, breaking it off, this thing, this freak-show- knew it would leave a wound. But she'd thought it would be just one more, the kind you clap a band-aid on, the kind that heals quickly, leaving a discreet scar. (She knows what his scar feels like under her lips. She begins to hurry again). A flesh wound, she'd thought. Not the kind you haemorrhage from.

Now she knows, she needs him - doesn't care if he's good for you or bad for you, muesli or morphine. Just knows she has to get back to him now, or things will be bad.

When she turns the corner to his crypt, there's an unfamiliar car standing there, wreathed in foil.

The door opens and Spike comes out, a cigarette glinting in his mouth, his blanket rolled up under one arm.

He stares at Buffy.

Her eyes are glazed and red-rimmed, and they glitter in the dusk. She's not standing straight; that Slayer elastic is vanished from her gait. She looks unbeautiful, she looks corroded, she looks collapsed.

This is it, this is why he can't leave Sunnydale. She'll die if he does.

He doesn't trust her to keep trying without him. He forgets he was leaving so she could have her Sweet Valley life back, forgets that another girl's agreed to elope with him, good as. Forgets their last encounter was ugly. The blaze of her presence, dimmed as it is, dazzles his mind as always.

'Why are you moving on, Spike' she asks coldly, saying his name as if it's 'Toe-rag'. 'Slept with everyone in Sunnydale already?'

He doesn't hear any betrayal, any shock, any loss, in her voice. Only sees that she still comes to kick him around, even if now she doesn't go to the trouble of moving a muscle to do it.

He closes the door behind him, pushes past her to the car, rotten with grief.

'Yeah,' he says, revving up. 'Whole football team.' He looks at her. 'I'm a slut.' Then he's gone, crashing off through the graveyard. She's left standing there, trying to scrape together some anger, numb.


	6. Chapter Six

Cold Comfort

Set after 'Entropy' (Buffy Season 6)

Chapter Six

Spike hammers out of Sunnydale. Bat out of the Hellmouth.

He's elated - high on the little chew of hate he got from Buffy's brutal, killingly-timed show of pique.

'Now leaving Sunnydale. Come back soon!' shoots by. He leaves this one intact.

He's got away. It's over. These three humiliating years- all the endless, pointless indecision; all the back and forth, all the nit-picking, all the thankless, wearing struggle of living with humans - he's swept them away: they're dust behind him, rising in clouds.

All but Anya.

She sits beside him, the spoils of war, a kidnapped Scooby princess, squinting at 'Vogue' in the dim light. He glances sideways at her. Cool as a cuke. Did she hear him right, when he said 'leave town'? Could she possibly have thought he was offering her a lift to the hairdresser?

But she's brought a case, it's on the back seat.

'Bloody hell,' he'd said when she'd held it out to him to put in the car. 'Where's the kitchen sink?'

'Don't be silly,' she'd said, brightly. 'These are all necessary items.' Her hands fumbled as she passed it over, and a red-feathered mule had fallen out of a half-zipped pocket. He was watching her, saw her face slacken, and wonders for a moment if this is going to be a worse mistake than he has so far suspected.

But she'd stuffed the mule back in, given him a ravishing wide-eyed smile and climbed into the front seat, fluffing up her hair while he rammed the bag in the back.

He slides another glance at her, touching up her red lipstick in the mirror. She's left everything she cares about behind her, dropped every person she's ever loved or liked without saying goodbye; hasn't forgotten her curlers.

What had he thought he was helping himself to when he'd stolen Anya? Why had he done it: pressed her, cajoled her, breathed his menacing charm down her silkily blue-veined neck? The car swerves. No sexual intercourse, he reminds himself.

She'd been lying when she'd said that. She knows there's going to be sexual intercourse.

Her careful, hard-won knowledge of the world has collapsed and left her in bewilderment. There's always been Xander, since she first found herself here, held fast in a single bewildering dimension. She should have known something was wrong. How could she have known?

She hasn't lived; she had no maps for how things were supposed to go; certainly has none for how they're supposed to go from here. She's afraid, and the only thing she's found that can safely, just for a moment, stave off the throttling panic is sexual intercourse. With Spike.

Sex with Xander had been like taking a bath in liquid pleasure. Warm and naked and delicious; stimulating, heart-racing, making you gasp, making you crave more and more.

Sex with Spike was like taking an overdose. Terrifying.

Making the decision to utterly give up control. Feeling your nerves sting, and hearing a roaring sound as you bend your lips to take your chance. Not knowing where you'll wake up, or if.

There hadn't been any acquisitive numbering of orgasms with Spike. That night in the magic shop she couldn't have remembered the word 'orgasm'; could barely remember the word 'mmm'.

That's what she wants. Black out.

She doesn't know what made her bluff. Doesn't want it to seem like her plan, is that it? She wants to be taken by surprise. She wants to be absolved; she wants to be seduced.

Is she learning hypocrisy - that human habit she'd struggled so hard to acquire? And failed, to endless silent choruses of raised eyebrows, rolled eyes; weak, tolerant smiles.

It's too dark to read the articles in her magazine but she can still see the pictures. Richness, possessions, glossy Hollywood lives. Xander. Xander. Xander.

Spike doesn't mind that much, about Anya's no-getting-cosy clause. Whatever he'd been hoping for, it hadn't been one long dirty weekend.

That wasn't why he'd sought her out, why he'd begged. Why he'd lied to her - because he'd known when they'd left: Xander still loves her. Knows she wouldn't be here if she knew it too.

Not that he'd say no, not for a second. Spike's blood may run cold, but it runs red. And he finds Anya rakishly attractive. He likes her brightness and her brashness, and her style, her forties chic. She reminds him of the American girls he ate in London, during the war. Garish, modish, talking a little too loud, always half-conscious that they didn't sound quite right. They'd tasted amazing. Warm, red, vitamin-pepped blood, he remembers it pouring fatteningly down his throat; iron-rich nectar after the watery, rationed blood of the English.

'I think we passed it already,' says Anya, staring at the map. 'What's the name again? St. Helga's what? What did that sign say, back when we passed the gas station?'

She's looking at the page so hard her eyes begin to cross.

'Saint. Hilda's. Lake,' Spike says in a tone that suggests he's going over old ground. 'We're not going to see it before dawn. This isn't Concorde we're in; it's the grandpa of all Volvos. And with you navigating we're bloody lucky if we don't end up in the sea.'

Anya's not listening. She swivels the page around and her face clears.

'Oh. _This_ is the right way up,' she says, pleased.

Spike gives the horizon a look that nearly cracks the windscreen and mutters something indistinct, but that definitely contains the word 'maps' and the word 'bints'.

Anya glares at him.

'This would be a lot easier, you know, if there wasn't gravy over two of the major junctions,' she says huffily.

Spike says nothing, but keeps watching the road. For some reason he's anxious not to draw her attention to the statistical unlikelihood of any stains on a vampire's road-map being gravy.

They sleep the night at a motel. Spike's not keen but Anya says she feels carsick. He's sure she's lying, but he's too much of a gentleman to call her on it, and too used to female perversity to risk her being sick on purpose in his new car. Besides, their situation is unsure, and slightly delicate. They don't know why they're here exactly, either of them - or why they're together. Safer not to rock the boat.

He wakes up and she's there, standing by the bed, swirled in a sheet.

He sits up in bed.

'Anya?'

She comes to him, awkwardly, her hands clutching the sheet. She sits down beside him, on the edge of the bed. Her amber-shadow eyes are empty. She needs him to fill the blanks, he sees.

He reaches up to her tangled hair, strokes her. She leans, lets him kiss her - soft, restorative, un-vampirish kissing, that goes on and on.

Then he can feel her pulse beat harder, feel her replying, kissing him deeply. Her arms come up, brushing the tensed muscles in his back, they close round his neck. The sheet's fallen away; his hand's drawing insistently, urgently, up and down her smooth side. She holds his cheek, there are nail-prints, her brittle day-face splinters with desire for the oblivion of Spike.

He rakes his hands over her - her hair, her back, her leg that's moving restlessly to surround him - pulling her closer. She breathes out sharply against his kiss - he's distracting her, she wants it over, she wants the dark. She's clutching at him, all over him, there's fear, they can hardly tell whose, she's pulling him onto her, into her; she wants the end, she wants it never to end.

After, he stays, reaches down for wet, cool, greedy kisses. They've been wordless, but now he says 'darling', just once, with his eyes shut.

She lets him do what Buffy never would, lie with his arms round her, caressing; and he does, fondly and foolishly, feverishly, until they fall asleep.

But still he wakes burning in the night. Burning for the hard words Anya doesn't say? For blows? For slender muscles that crush him to craven submission, for a toothless bite that brings his dead heart to his mouth?

For the schoolgirl curve of a cheek he's traced more times in the glittering dark space of his mind than with trembling fingers. For Buffy, as he does every night. For his little goldilocks, his creature of the dark.


	7. Chapter Seven

Cold Comfort

Set after 'Entropy' (Buffy Season 6)

Chapter Seven

She's dreaming. Hands pick at her, ugly faces frown and glimmer green. The brown men rage through her dream - there are voices, the flapping of pages; a buzzing and rustling, an endless racketing, hammering hum. She turns her face to the floor that she's lying on; it's dusty stone, but it feels like home. Their voices are louder, her arms and legs feel like air; they're disappearing. She tries to scream, but somehow it doesn't work. Suddenly she's shaking and shaking, or she's being shaken… She can hear her name-

'Dawn. _Dawn_. Honey, come on. You need to wake up now. _Dawnie_.'

'Tara, don't. You're shaking her too hard-'

'She's got to wake up. _Dawn_.'

Willow watches as Tara, kneeling by the sofa, shakes the unconscious Dawn by the shoulders with a fierce energy that Willow hasn't seen in her before. 'I'll call 911,' she suggests uneasily.

'No,' says Tara, sharply.

Willow hesitates, nervous at the unexpected vehemence of her tone. 'This isn't-'

Tara frowns for a moment, and then turns back to Dawn. 'She's waking up.'

Dawn's tossing her head restlessly on the cushion, her fine hair knitting itself into snarls. She gives a little bubbling, mewling moan, like a kitten being drowned. Tara's smoothing her hair, calling to her in her low, gentle voice, 'Hey, Dawnie. Come on. You're ok. You're back home now, sweetie. Good girl.'

Dawn's eyes open and she looks up at Tara, dazed, as though she doesn't know where she is.

Tara comes downstairs after she's got Dawn to bed. Willow looks up from her computer.

'Dawnie ok?'

Tara pauses, leaning on the banister.

'I'm not sure,' she says.

Willow closes her lap-top.

'You think we should call the doctor? Maybe I should go look for Buffy.' She remembers that Buffy left to look for Spike, and adds hastily, 'Or I could call Xander – he could take us to the hospital.'

'I don't know,' says Tara, slowly. 'I'm not sure it'll help.'

'You don't think we should be on the safe side? I mean, it's probably just teenage stress – you know, combined with Hellmouth-y stress – but what if it's something she ate, or a – a virus, or something?' The thought is pulsing at the back of her mind, Buffy won't survive it if Dawn dies.

Tara comes down the last step, and sits down on the sofa with Willow.

'I got this really strong feeling,' she says. 'It was like she was - slipping away.'

Willow looks aghast.

'No – not… I mean -' Tara sighs. 'While Dawn was out, it felt like her aura was disappearing, being… sucked away.' She draws a breath. 'And when I was putting her to bed, she said - she said -'

Dawn's eyes had been bleak as they'd looked up at her, with creases underneath them. She'd lain back against the pillow looking small and flat.

In a hard little voice she'd said, 'Are they going to take me away?'

Tara looks helplessly at Willow. 'She was pretty out of it. I don't know what it means, but -'

A key turns in the lock, and they both fall quiet.

'Hey guys,' says Buffy, closing the door briskly. 'Did you get anything else from the location spell?' Willow's and Tara's eyes flick across to the results of the location spell, lying crumpled under the chair where Tara dropped it as she saw Dawn fall. Tara jumps up to rescue it.

'No, that was pretty much it,' she says. 'Just Warren and the robot-building. No new updates.'

'Oh. Well, good. Don't really feel like messing with the socially-challenged ones tonight, anyway.'

She sounds a lot better than she did when she left, thinks Willow.

'How'd things go with Spike?' she asks. 'Is he going to pitch in and be undercover-guy?'

Buffy's got her back to them, taking off her coat.

'He wasn't there,' she says. 'Probably off somewhere in town, making the demon world wish it never got out of bed this evening.' She rests her hands on the table for a moment, then turns round to face them, smiling. 'Dawn in bed?' she asks, sitting down.

Tara looks at Willow.

'Yes,' she says. 'She's kind of sick. Actually, she – she fainted.'

For a moment Buffy's face just looks tired and blank. She looks as though she's trying to remember where she is. Then she frowns.

'That's weird,' she says. 'She fainted last night. Do you guys think she's eating ok?'

They exchange looks again. Tara leans forward, and says gently,

'She said some strange things while she was waking up. Willow and I are going to look into it.'

'It's probably nothing,' says Willow, reassuringly. 'Do we still have those books on the Order of Dagon that Giles ordered last year? We never used them, 'cause they didn't arrive until – until we didn't need them any more. Maybe they'd have some helpful stuff about Dawn.'

Tara nods.

'They're probably still in the shop,' she says.

'Well… good,' says Buffy, smiling steadily. 'We can have a relaxing movie night, all research-free, and ask Anya about the books tomorrow.'

It's Bernie who draws the short straw.

He lingers outside the door of Room Five, not keen on the job of waking up that weird punk-rocker guy at this hour, not just to get him to move his crummy car. He'd had a kind of a manner with him, that blond guy, chip on his shoulder or something. He was dressed weird too, like he was a pop-star or a homo. Not that Bernie's got anything against fairies - his own cousin Percy wears pink shirts and drinks crème de menthe, and a smarter guy never played the clarinet. He draws a wheezy breath, knocks firmly, and opens the door.

When he does he gets a shock. The blond guy's there all right, asleep and stark nude, all wrapped up in some snoozing floozy. What's with the world anyway, when a guy can't open a door at 6.35am in his own motel without busting in on some naked goddamn orgy?

Spike stirs for a moment, feeling Anya's hair against his lips, hazily. Then the sounds of horrified hotelier begin to drift through to him: throat-clearing and finger-tapping. He lifts a tousled head and peers at Bernie through puffy and confused eyes.

'Yeah?' he says.

In tones of heavy disapproval Bernie says,

'Didn't like to disturb you, uh, Mr... uh...'

'Not at all,' says Spike, croakily deadpan.

The floozy sort of shifts and gasps at this point, and then sits up, holding her head. Bernie's eyes bulge. She doesn't have a stitch on. Not one of them floaty things they used to wear in the movies to get past the censors; nothing. Last time he saw a girl that goddamn naked was before the war. Before the flood more like it, his wife says later when he's describing the painful scene.

It's the same girl he checked in with, notes Bernie. When the guy'd said two singles, he'd figured they were brother and sister. Possibly they are - Bernie has few illusions about these arty types. Fine figure she is though. Fine, fine... his jaw comes gently to rest on his undershirt.

Anya drags the back of her hand across her eyes and shakes her head. When she looks up to meet Bernie's deeply interested gaze, she gasps, clutches around for the sheet and yelps,

'Spike!'

Spike, who had been on the point of asking Bernie if it was the air in his Aero that made him say 'O', asks instead,

'Something you wanted, mate?'

Bernie comes to with a start.

'Just seein' if you could move your car,' he mumbles. 'Wife's sister wants to, uh, huh, park her truck.'

'Fine,' says Spike, looking pointedly at the door. 'Ta-ta, then.'

Bernie takes a last, awed look at Anya and leaves, shaking his head.

Before the door closes behind him, Anya turns on Spike.

'Well, thank you for defending my honour!' she says, pulling the sheet tighter around her. 'Why don't you just sell tickets?'

'Me!' Spike retorts, eyebrows raised. He slumps back onto his elbows. 'I bring you to a nice place like this and you roam the corridors all night in the altogether! I think you can bloody expect to dispense a few cheap thrills.'

He pauses. Not the ideal choice of words, under the circumstances.

'When I say 'cheap thrills',' he begins, but trails off, unable to think off anything both conciliatory and plausible.

Anya gives him an ambiguous look and leaves the room, still inelegantly swathed in white, like a pretty kebab.

Spike sighs. He'd woken up groggy, entangled, amorous. Her sharpness startled him. It's her natural tone of voice, he's used to it, been used to it for years.

But he's not used to waking with his lips at the hollow of her throat, in her warmth, her soft ringless hand on his neck.

Bernie gets his returns, about forty minutes later. Can't take the vengeance out of the girl.

As they're leaving, Spike pays Bernie, and stops to ask about gas stations; Anya goes out to the car to check for holes in his silver-foil screen. There aren't any - it's still dark anyway- and she comes back in, crossing to where Spike's standing, at the counter. She puts one arm around him casually, and leans in towards Bernie, flashing him a crocodile's smile.

'Thank you so much,' she says charmingly. 'For the custard.'

Spike pauses in the act of paying over dollar bills, and turns in her half-embrace to look at her. Up until now he'd thought she'd been significantly less nuts than either Dru or Buffy. Hell, he'd been wrong. Against all odds, Anya was leading the field. Bernie's eyes are straining at their sockets: if possible he's more transfixed than during their earlier encounter. A well-dressed couple with a spectacled child who have just come in watch her with interest from the doorway.

'It was so thoughtful of you. All over my pillow-case. Really a very generous quantity.''

Bernie gapes. The well-dressed couple exchange worried glances.

A flicker of doubt crosses Anya's face. 'It _was_ custard, wasn't it? I don't know what else it could h-'

Spike grabs her roughly by the wrist.

'Excuse me,' he says to Bernie, as smoothly as he can. 'My wife has one of her headaches coming on.' He nods goodbye, and wrenches Anya to the door. She gives the pop-eyed Bernie a little wave as they leave - close on the heels of the well-dressed family, who are retreating in an orderly fashion towards their Merc.

As they get in the car, he says,

'What was that for?'

A tiny smile escapes Anya, and then disappears.

'What?' she says. 'It wasn't correct for me to thank that guy?'

Spike flicks her a murderous glare.

'Don't try pulling that Goody Two-Shoes stuff. And you can ditch all the "vengeance demons are unfamiliar with social conventions and complex sentence construction". Feel like I'm on the road with an Introduction to Social Anthropology. I know you can talk properly.'

Anya's silent. Spike looks across at her again.

'S'ppose I should count myself lucky you didn't have his ears cut off and his internals crocheted into a fetching pattern,' he says.

Anya's looking down at her Iced Fuchsia toenails.

'I don't have my pendant anyway,' she says, in a subdued voice.

'Yeah?' says Spike. 'Give it back to D'Hoffryn?'

'No.' She sniffs. 'It's in the Magic Box. I didn't think I'd need it.'

He hopes that's not a threat.

It's not quite dusk when they reach St Hilda's Lake Hotel, so they sit in the car to wait. Spike's not quite sure what Willy's told this guy, but first impressions count, and he's not keen to bowl in there huddled in a blanket, Vamp Flambé.

Anya gets out to stretch her legs and comes back drinking a diet coke. When she gets in she hands one to Spike.

'So what's going on?' she says, slurping. 'What's this guy's problem?'

'Hmm?' says Spike, looking at the drink she's brought him. 'Oh - Fyarl demons, apparently. Raiding the joint, terrorizing the guests, nicking the spoons, that kind of thing, Willy said. Should be fun.'

He's talking absently, turning the coke can round and round in his hand. There's a lot about life that he just doesn't know about – he's starting to get that. He's always been contemptuous of the Scoobies and their squeaky clean faces and bedrooms and records. They've always been horrified at the things he's done, and he's always sneered at their New World naivety. Don't knock it 'til you've tried it, was his attitude when they recoiled from his fond reminiscences about bygone eviscerations.

But he's been doing just that.

He may have spilt brains and said rude things at sensitive moments; he may have broken promises and spines; he's put the body of a dead German governess to uses they'd be helpless to describe; but when it comes to being casually offered soft drinks, he's a trembling virgin.

'Oh well,' says Anya. 'I was hoping it would be mainly desk-work. Guess not.' She looks out of the window. 'Sun's going down.'

Spike opens his can and takes a sip. It tastes of shampoo, but he drinks it to the last drop.

It's a smart hotel. Smarter than you'd think, if you'd met Willy the Snitch. Smarter than Spike'd been expecting. He'd thought any contact of Willy's would be running a dead-beat flea-hole, the kind of joint where the dress code's demon-casual - blood on your chin and some kind of obvious skin disorder.

Anya pats her hair self-consciously as they climb the steps, and so does Spike. For some annoying reason, he thinks, she doesn't look like she's been driving all day after a cheap night in a cheap motel, and he does. Women.

There's a girl sitting on the railings outside the hotel gate. She's got brown hair with a pink streak and she's smoking a roll-up. She's dressed the way the girls used to dress when the boys dressed like Spike. Spike gives her a nod as they pass her, wondering if she's been turned away for looking too indie/alternative. She takes a drag and gives him a cold look, as in, don't get fresh.

The inside's smart too. There's a fake-marble-topped desk with orchids in a cut-glass vase at one end, and a tanned, determinedly classy middle-aged man leaning against it at the other. His tan drops a few shades down the scale as he sees Spike and Anya.

Spike takes in the décor and the glazed look in the classy man's eyes, and doesn't see any harm in offering him a trademark charming grin while he fumbles for a screwed-up piece of paper in the pocket of his leather coat.

'Hi,' he says, frowning at he scribbles on the note. 'Uh… Trevor?'

The classy man recoils, looking so nervous and affronted that Spike begins to wonder if he's said 'Blow-job?' by mistake. Eventually the man clears his throat and says distantly,

'Mr Trevor Clarence. Is there some way I can assist you?' This in a voice that implies he hopes it's something to with directions to Antarctica. Spike holds out his hand.

'Name's Spike,' he says. The classy man looks as though this hardly surprises him, but doesn't actually reply. 'Friend of Willy's,' supplies Spike helpfully. 'From Sunnydale.' Trevor winces slightly. Spike lowers his voice: 'Heard you'd been having a little trouble with a couple of Fyarl demons. Willy thought maybe I could help you out.'

Trevor looks up, aggrieved.

'St Hilda's Lake is not the Hellmouth,' he says sharply. 'We have no demons here, I can assure you.'

Two men pass through the lobby, drinking cocktails and talking about racing. One has antlers. Spike raises his eyebrows.

Trevor passes a hand over his brow.

'Mr Spike. It was extremely good of you to offer your services, but I'm afraid our mutual… acquaintance has been quite misguided. The situation here is entirely under control-'

He breaks off as a beautifully-coiffed lady appears at the door and crosses the room to where he stands. She's expensively thin and wears an elegantly cut, keep-off-the-grass black suit. Caroline Charles, thinks Anya, staring harder than she would have if Xander had been there.

'Honey?' the coiffed lady sing-songs at Trevor, who visibly stands to attention.

'Yes dear?' he says nervously. His posture is excellent, Anya notes.

'Those possums, honey,' says the coiffed lady, straightening his tie. 'The ones that got into the kitchen last week, and took the veal and smashed the coffee grinder?'

'The? Uh. The possums,' agrees Trevor wretchedly, avoiding Spike's cool gaze. The coiffed lady taps her patent leather toe impatiently at this stammered response.

'I'm afraid they got in again this afternoon. They've eaten the chef.' She smiles tolerantly and turns to leave. 'You'll get it seen to, won't you?'

'S-sure baby,' Trevor calls weakly after her. He looks helplessly at Spike. 'For a couple of hundred dollars - you'd…?' he trails off hopefully.

'Say five,' suggests Spike, glancing at his tattered black fingernails.

'Take room number twenty-nine,' says Trevor, sighing. 'You've got three days.'

Room Twenty-Nine's not bad. Bit heavy on the floral print, but life's tough.

Anya touches up her make-up and carefully unpacks her bag while Spike flops on the bed and begins sharpening a big knife. Gender-role stereotyping amongst love-torn cross-country demon-hunters, an Introduction to Social Anthropology, chapter five.

There was no argument about sharing a room. Spike's unwilling to further confuse Trevor, and Anya, possibly to avoid any further comments about wandering about in the altogether, hasn't said a word.

Spike's sharpening with complete absorption, in that way he has. If the knife were a sentient knife, it would no doubt be feeling itself the only knife in the room. Anya watches, fascinated by the sight. Then she gives herself a little shake and carries on unpacking.

'So are we going to do it tonight?' she asks conversationally.

Spike looks up. She's methodically straightening the seam in a knitted sweater, cooler than a diamond-eating frost-monster. Do it? This is why they'll never make a movie of her life, he thinks. Cut the tension, kill the plot.

At his silence, she looks up too. 'Spike? Are we going to kill the Fyarl tonight?'

'Oh. The Fyarl. Right -yeah. No,'

'Because I need to know whether to wear pants or not.' She puts the sweater away on the shelf and lovingly dusts off the dress she's wearing. 'This is new.'

'Well, get as fancy as you like,' says Spike, going back to his sharpening. 'We need to find out who they're working for before we kill 'em.'

'Working for?'

''Yeah - The Fyarl are do-as-they're-told-types. Brains of a scrambled egg. Someone's got to be giving them instructions. We can go out tonight, get to know the demon scene a bit, see if there's any rumours flying about.'

Anya finds a thin orange and silver dress, and steps behind the wardrobe door to put it on. She's thinking.

'What are you doing this for?' she asks suddenly.

'Don't want to skin a fellow with a blunt knife now, do I?' says Spike, without raising his eyes or breaking his rhythm. He's getting used to deflecting weird non-sequiturs.

'No,' she says. 'This. I thought you were cutting loose. What are you doing here, chasing up low-risk mercenaries at minimum wage? '

'Low risk? You're hard to please, aren't you? They ate the bloody chef.'

'You know what I mean,' she says, unperturbedly setting a comb in her hair. She rubs at a smear of mascara on the toe of a silver pump. She'd packed in a hurry. 'I know drinking the blood of the innocent's out-'

Spike winces. 'But there are other sources of gainful employment. You could get into debt-collection. I know you used to call in debts for Willy. Scaly Sherwin from the caves said you were the best little leg-breaker Sunnydale ever had. He told me he's seen you crack skulls like they were M&Ms -'

That makes Spike look up.

'You shouldn't have anything to say to Scaly Sherwin,' he says sharply. 'He's not a nice bloke.'

Anya drops her shoe, this surprises her so much.

'Right,' she says. 'Well if he asks me to go to the movies, I'll tell him I'm not allowed to date reptile demons 'til I'm in college.'

Spike gives her a look, but she carries on. 'Anyway - that's where the big bucks are, these days. Focused, efficient brutality. We've not in the gang any more. I don't get why we still have to be the good guys.'

He shrugs and goes back to his knife. 'You know why,' he says rather dourly. 'Same as always. La Belle Dame Sans Merci hath me in bloody thrall.'

Anya stops folding and stares.

'La Belle Dame Sans Merci?' she says, shocked. 'That's awful.'

'You know 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci?' says Spike, equally surprised. He hadn't really expected her to get the reference. If she read at all, he'd assumed it would be either invocations to the devil in ancient Sanskrit, or _'Cosmo'_ - certainly not fanciful ballads of the Romantic era.

'She did some work for me once,' explains Anya. 'Couple of hundred years ago. We didn't stay in touch.'

Spike rubs the back of his head. He feels there may be crossed wires involved.

'The Belle Dame I'm thinking of,' he says, 'is the subject of a poem by Keats.'

'Oh,' says Anya. 'The one I'm thinking of is a demon who gradually vaporizes men's hearts and then sucks them out of their mouths during sex.'

Yep, thinks Spike, sounds like Buffy. There's a pause, and Spike has an eerie feeling that they're both waiting for Xander to say something dumb – 'boy, she sounds like a scary mother - maybe a little scarier in Spike's version', or 'yeah, but can she turn into a giant bug?'.

This alarms him. The sod might have ruined his life, but he wasn't going to infiltrate his speech patterns.

Anya's gazing out the window, looking like dingoes ate her baby. Brooding, in Spike's opinion, is for sissies and Angel and those about to lay eggs. He sits up. He's only got one stock response to the blues - get ratted.

He jumps to his feet, picks up her purse and thrusts it at her.

'Come on sweetheart,' he says, giving her the look he'd been giving his knife, earlier. 'Let's go out. Break some heads and some hearts and some by-laws, and home in time for tea. Paint the town red and all.'

She smiles up at him and takes the purse.

'You mean red in the figurative sense, right?' she says as he guides her out the door.


	8. Chapter Eight

Cold Comfort

Set after 'Entropy' (Buffy Season 6)

Chapter Eight

The first place they paint red is a glitzy demon bar by the shore of the lake.

Spike, with cautious headmasterly charm, sits Anya down while he goes to buy drinks. She looks around appreciately. Velvet sofas, pale green like shallow water; swinging bead curtains and mosaic floors; a mirror-ball turning slowly.

Anya closes her eyes for a moment and feels the smoky, perfumey, demon-rank air rise warmly around her.

She's still shuddery from the misery that hit her in the hotel room, the cold eye of the storm that suddenly sucked her in. He's gone. He never loved her. She should have known.

But Spike's at the bar buying her a gin and tonic, and the mirror-ball's glittering like a sequinned sun in a demon dimension, and the world's shrinking to a noisy, jazzy, dry-iced swelter of din. Merry hell. She's safe here.

Spike's standing over her, holding out a wide-rimmed glass that clinks deliciously. He looks concerned, but also manic, like an electrocuted school counsellor. Anya takes the drink gratefully, her thoughts scrambling spider-leggily. He cares so much, he cares not at all. He's bringing her peace: in the clattery haven of the bar, in the fiery calm of the drink in her hand, in the roaring oblivion of his loveless, passionate... a small noise escapes her. Spike sits down, still eyeing her warily.

Anya smiles widely at him, hoping she doesn't look too nuts, and then gulps at her cocktail. His eyebrows hover for a moment; then he lifts his own glass.

'Carnage,' he nods and necks the bloody-looking contents, leaving Anya wondering numbly whether it's a toast or the name of his cocktail, or possibly an extract from his to-do list.

He's scanning the room, slightly hyper, not like detectives in films who play it cool.

''No Fyarl in here tonight,' he reports, eyes still searching.

'Are you sure?' says Anya, trying to sound intense and focused.

'Sure,' confirms Spike. 'Not for miles. They smell like ditch.'

Anya nods. She doesn't care if they smell like roses in May. She's here for the ride; she's here for the rest.

She can't shush her thoughts; she can't shush the endless I wish.

Wishes - she knows how disastrous they are. She'd always known; she'd lived on the proceeds. But she'd never thought her own were. Hadn't known she could want something - a man - so much it could rack her invisibly with cold-falling despair. The world she's come to believe in threatens to unravel. She looks into her glass and thinks of Spike.

Wings that beat rapidly in her throat when he was near enough to reflect back her breath. Last night he'd taken her over. This was why they shut the door at that moment, in those films - on Vivien Leigh and that attractive man with the moustache. She'd never understood before. Sometimes there's no more story left that you can tell.

Spike's watching her, the shade of a frown lurking, his Fyarl hunt forgotten. Going off her rocker, he thinks with a pang. Not that he minds the company of fragile-minded females, usually. Never happier than when his baby's got the bends. But Anya - he wants to keep her sane, if he can. Protect her from the vultures in her brain, as no-one protected him. A foolish thought .

He glances across at her, one elbow leant on the table, vacantly eating her glacé cherry off the point of her paper parasol.

All the time, behind her brightness, she's raw, dreary, quietly helpless - he can feel it. She's like a charming flapper on the brink of alcoholic breakdown. Rouged, bobbed, bead-bedecked. Hollow. It's what he loved in Buffy, what no-one else could see, the secret of her rawness, her youth, her despair.

He watches the coins of disco-ball light trailing over her cheeks and hair.

Suddenly he's sick to the gills of old things - long-preserved passions and grudges; pale, mummified beauties with bedsores of the brain.

What's to keep him from staying here? On the road with a girl who thinks her brown-eyed sweetheart was holding up the world, who was born yesterday, who wears her heart on her sleeve?

What does he have to go back for, really?

Anya jabs his arm with the chewed end of a cocktail stick, and he looks up.

There's a girl standing by the table. Her skirt is leather, and teeny. There's a pink streak in her hair.

'You guys from Sunnydale?' she says.

It's the girl they saw outside the hotel gates, Spike realizes.

'I saw you at the hotel,' she says. 'Trevor's place.'

'You know Trevor?' says Anya, sounding surprised

'That son of a hellhound,' confirms the girl, glumly, dropping into the seat next to Anya's. 'Got you ghostbusting for him, has he?'

Anya looks uncertainly at Spike. He pauses, not sure how under-cover they're supposed to be.

'Little Willy told me all about it,' the girl reassures them. 'Figured I'd come see if you needed a hand.'

'You know Willy?' says Spike.

'Sure,' nods the girl. 'I'm Susie.'

Blank looks from Spike and Anya. The punk girl looks hurt. 'Willy never mention his little sister?' she says.

Recognition darts into Spike's eyes.

'I never listen to Willy,' he assures her, hastily and courteously. 'Probably talks about you night and day.'

'Right,' says Susie, sounding bitter and drunk. 'Him and his trashy, deadbeat demon-hole. He can go right to hell.' She pulls an illegall-looking cigarette from behind her ear and lights it.

'So, how come you know Trevor?' says Anya, rather too incredulously. Susie takes a deep toke.

'We useter go steady,' she admits.

This seems to jump-start Anya out of her lethargy. 'You're the Willy's- sister who used to date Trevor?' she says. 'That's very disturbing. He's way too wrinkly and old to take out girls of your age.'

''Ah, he can still show a little girl a good time,' says Susie with a regretful smile.

Spike recoils slightly. Amidst the rich mélange of cultural detritus in his mind, there's a deep core of soap-opera moralism.

'He's no good, though,' Susie says, unsteadily, blowing out a stream of brown smoke. 'Skunk ruined my life. Like, for good.'

She looks about fifteen to Spike, so he doesn't take this weary defeatism too deeply to heart. Anya, he notes grimly, is getting a warm, concerned look on her face, and seems to be settling herself more comfortably into her seat, all ready for girlish confidences and second degree murder.

'Did he ever… hurt you?' she asks in a serious tone, gravelly with compassion. Whatever they say about Anyanka, Spike thinks, she knows her job.

'Yeah, right,' says Susie. 'That sissy. Only thing of mine he ever hurt was my knuckles.'

'Maybe he ignored your emotions, didn't make you feel special?'

'He dropped me like a stone, the bum. Took off with some old Dynasty cleavage. After I'd stuck him all these years.'

'Years!' says Spike, momentarily losing his vamp-cool. For an instant, he can't help it, he thinks of Dawn.

Anya shoots him an irritated glance.

'Sometimes it can feel good to talk about things that upset you, Susie,' she says. 'Especially to someone who understands how poisonous a man can be. Why don't you tell me all about it?'

A cold shudder runs down Spike's spine.

Susie kicks the table shyly. 'Nothing to tell,' she said. 'He owned the skating rink, useter give me free rides.' She wipes a trail of mascara across her round pale cheek. 'He had a cool car,' she sighs. 'But then he goes in on this hot-crap hotel and suddenly I'm not good enough for him. I got no class, he said. Couldn't take me anywhere. That skunk.' Her voice trembles. 'He - he said he loved me only-'

'Well, that's nice,' says Spike, hoping to round things off on a cheery note.

'Only, he needed to get ahead in the hospitality business.' Susie wipes her nose. Spike glances at his watch.

'He hated my family - he thought Willy was a no-hope bum. He useter say mom was a - a lousy old tramp who only got out of bed to steal rubbing alcohol.'

Anya makes a face of raw disgust, and hurriedly covers it with a sympathetic noise.

'So he scrams out of Sunnydale, dead of night, like the plague-rat he is, and, time I hunt him down here, he's married to this old acid nightmare, and running the fanciest place in town.'

She sighs, and draws on her joint, sadly.

Anya leans forward and lays a hand on Susie's.

'Don't you sometimes wish-'

Spike clears his throat,

'So, Susie. You. er - know anything about these Fyarl raids?'

Anya looks from Spike to Susie, then rolls her eyes, withdraws her hand and chips in,

'Like, who's organizing them?'

Susie, however, isn't easily de-railed.

'Who do you think,' she says, scathingly. 'The dirty skanking whore-bag who makes that reptile's desperate, snotting life as crappy as it oughta be.'

Spike has severe trouble with this, but Anya's fluent in woman-scorned language, and translates.

'You mean Trevor's wife?' she says doubtfully, looking at Spike. 'That seems kind of unlikely. She appeared very concerned about the raids. And also mystified.'

'It's a put-on,' says Susie with conviction. 'She's behind it. She wants to make him suffer. She's a Lamia - she feeds on pain. Anyway, she just married him for his money. Bet she beats him every single night. He shoulda stuck with me.' She shakes her head, slapping out a hot rock that's melting her fishnet knee.

Anya sighs. She feels that everyone's conspiring to make a simple case of beat-the-bad-guys unnecessarily complicated.

'Why would she want to make bad things happen to the hotel?' she points out. 'That way they both lose money.'

Susie gives a raucous laugh, making Anya jump.

'Oh, sure,' she says. 'Cause a Lamia-devil's gonna stick around for, what, couples therapy with the guy whose pain she's sucking on? You guys are good! All she's gonna do is drink him dry, take his cash and scam the heck out on those skinny little legs.'

'So she's really a Lamia?' says Anya thoughtfully. 'I thought you were just name-calling.'

Spike's attention-span is straining. He doesn't know what a Lamia is and he wants another drink. Susie's holding a pint of what smells to him like apricot brandy. She takes a slurp.

'Anyway, if you guys think she's so daisy-fresh, watcha doing tailing her?' she demands.

Spike and Anya exchange looks.

'We're not tailing her,' Anya says.

'What, you here on a double date?' says Susie. She jerks her head towards a couple laughing by the bar. They follow her gaze.

The guy's a Scavenger demon, hulking and chain-mail-skinned. The woman is ash-blonde, shimmery with green sequins, leaning with casual grace against the wall. Spike raises his eyebrows at Anya. It's Trevor's wife.

'So she sees other… creatures,' says Anya. 'Maybe she just Digs The Look.' Spike watches as a slender, heavily-jewelled hand appears, sinuously, around the demon's big neck.

'That's not a woman who thinks killer possums ate her chef,' he says, lighting a cigarette. 'She's got something to hide.'

'Don't sprain your brain, Einstein,' mutters Susie. She throws away the stub and stands up. 'I gotta go,' she says. 'Give me a call. I told little Willy I'd help you out if I could.'

Spike nods his thanks, not feeling optimistic about this.

'Are you staying at the hotel?' asks Anya.

Susie snorts.

'Like they'd let me in to scrub floors. I'm hanging with Dave the Teeth. Over the tattoo parlour. You guys have fun at Trevor's, now - don't let the bedbugs bite.' She drains her brandy-glass. 'They leave real ugly scars.'

'Nice to see good old-fashioned insanity hasn't gone out of style,' says Spike when she's gone. 'What's a Lamia?'

'Kind of snake demon,' says Anya. 'You have to kill them with an iron blade. Over running water. I think,' she adds. 'I never have.'

He lights a cigarette.

'This could be your big chance then,' he says. 'Once we track her down.'

Anya looks across at the bar.

'We're not James Bond,' she says firmly. 'Why can't we just kill things, get paid and move on?'

'Touch of vengeance in the air did you good, did it?' he says rather sourly. She's looking several rungs up the ladder of sane.

'You know I wouldn't have,' she says, with a blithely unconvincing smile. She leans back in her seat, looking almost serene.

The mirror-ball stops spinning, slowly, and changes direction.

''Nother drink, pet?' Spike offers, feeling suddenly lavish and irresponsible.

'It's on me,' says Anya in a careful voice, smiling broadly. Xander must've had a tough time teaching her that one, thinks Spike.

'Thanks,' he says. 'Scotch, straight-up.'

While she's gone, he watches Trevor's wife and wonders if she's a Machiavellian snake-devil or just a demon-groupie, and what on earth he's meant to do about it anyway.

'What the hell's this?' he asks, when Anya comes back with his drink. It's a rich green colour, with a mauve paper parasol poking over the fluted rim. 'Where's my scotch?'

'Well,' she dodges, setting it down on the table. 'They recommended this.'

'Who did?'

'I'm sure it's delicious.' She sits down, sipping a gin and tonic.

Spike swivels towards the barman, holding up the green drink with a furious look on his face. A man in a lemon-coloured suit, with tusks, seated at the bar, holds up his own glass and beams back at him.

'Anya,' Spike says, a terrible suspicion gripping him. 'You did pay for this yourself?'

Anya busies herself reapplying her lipstick.

'Oh, he wanted you to have it,' she says. 'It's called a Sweet Nancy.' Spike stares at her.

'What? I think he's very handsome.' She lifts her glass. 'Cheers!'


	9. Chapter Nine

Cold Comfort

Set after 'Entropy' (Buffy Season 6)

Chapter Nine

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Spike walks through the streets alone.

It's all gone wrong.

Nothing's going according to plan. Predictably, he supposes, as he hadn't a plan to begin with.

Or he had. He'd meant to cut free, get noble, make like a good guy, impress Buffy at show-and-tell. He just hadn't worked out the details.

Planning isn't his style; he has no talent for it - spends about as much time on thinking things through as he does on fine embroidery.

Anya's excellent at it.

He sits down on a stile. They'd met up with a couple of Fyarl on the way back to the hotel. On his white hand is a band-aid.

Out of her compact beaded purse she'd produced it, handed it to him casually. He'd stared at it in non-comprehension and she'd taken it back and unwrapped it; taken his hand briskly and smoothed it on. He can still feel the pressure of her two small thumbs.

He hadn't bargained for any of these minor, unprecedented attentions. She takes them so for granted that he feels he no longer exists. Where's the Spike who tastes his own nose-blood, who saved the world to piss off Angel, who would have drunk his pledge to the Slayer in the blood of his dark darling?

In the cool dawn of Anya's matter-of-fact gaze, his blood-and-thunder gestures seem grossly overblown. His sense of overpowering evil is slipping, is already gone.

He feels the embarrassed emptiness of a man who realizes that the other person's already hung up. He's been shouting at thin air.

Those lines from Keats - they haven't crossed his mind in all these years of being a vampire.

'La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Hath thee in thrall.'

Why had they come back to him tonight?

Reminders from the days in which a boy he no longer thinks of as himself looked at himself in a mirror and fretted over the unfashionable wave of his hair; slept with Tennyson's Maud under his pillow; stood beneath a staircase and watched Cecily flow down it, whispering in shamefully heated breath,

'She is coming, my dove, my dear,

She is coming, my life, my fate.'

What if he'd stolen up those stairs two minutes earlier, he thinks. Burst into her room unannounced. Caught her pulling up her stockings or staring out of the window picking her nose. Dethroned her. He'd thought of her as a queen, as a blinding vision of austere purity. Andersen's Ice Queen, Diana surprised by Actaeon. What had he been to her but the plodding, sentimental son of a poor clergyman?

'You're beneath me,' she'd said. He'd mistranslated.

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Tara dips her finger into the potion beside her. She writes a red arc into the air, then a blue. They fuse into a hovering mist that shimmers violet over the circle of power.

'There's nothing wrong with it,' she says, wiping her hands on her jeans. 'Sometimes mixtures that use magnolia root can lose their potency if you keep them on the boil, but...'

'Why isn't it working?' says Xander, rather brutally. He's been awake for two nights, procuring the key ingredient for this spell; and time, as they're all aware, is trickling away.

'Xander. Spells can be tricky.' Willow turns to Tara. 'Maybe if I...' She catches her eye. '... Had another look at the translation?'

Tara stands up, breaking the circle of power. She hands Willow a grubby handwritten page.

'The incantation's on the front,' she says. 'The extracts from the Books of Dagon are on the back, in purple.'

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Buffy sits on the floor by Dawn's bed, listening to her sister breathe. It's like listening to butterflies think.

Dawn's cheeks and hands are cold; her skin is as soft as her breath. Hardly there.

'I need to know that you'll take care of her.'

Hardly visible, hardly tangible; she's slipping through the net of the senses as Buffy watches on, filled with a pulsing fear that makes everything hazy but the whitening features of Dawn's stone-still face.

She knows what's happening. Willow and Tara explained it to her gently. The monks did a spell. Dawn was never meant to be permanent. The borrowed energy that kept her in place would be dispersed, gradually, once the threat posed by Glory was averted. The Key would be restored to its sacred and hidden location. Dawn would be gone.

'But we're working on a spell,' Tara had assured her. 'We've found one in the Diaries of Ard Daraich.' She'd glanced at Willow. 'It seems to be a way to completely reverse the - the disappearing process. It uses pretty basic ingredients; except for - um - vampire-blood - and we're taking care of that tonight.'

'Vampire blood?' Buffy had said, catching at the words. 'I can get vampire blood.' She'd been horrified, in a far-away place, to hear that her voice sounded halting and thick, like a drug-addict's.

'Oh, sweetie, no,' said Tara, distressed. Buffy, in a flash of clarity, realized she didn't look up to swatting wasps; never mind super-powered hand-to-hand.

'We have everything under control.' Tara stroked her hair. 'I promise.'

Buffy took hold of her stroking hand in a convulsive movement. 'Will my memories go?' she whispered, tears of terror coming to her eyes. 'Will they take her right out of my head?'

Soothing words like peaches in syrup silt up the floor of the bedroom. The words she hears from downstairs are different, madder and more helpless.

That was the third goddamn vampire. This is all going to hell. It's not working, we're losing her. The sonofabitch just left town and he's taken her with him. Buffy's going crazier than a coot up there, and we're all sitting around reading library books about it.

She puts her face in her hands.

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She can still hear their voices, downstairs, through the open door. Willow's intoning something, haltingly, as though she's reciting a poem she hasn't properly learned.

'I overturn the Disjointed... the Dissertation...'

'Dissolution,' says Tara. 'Give it to me; I'll read it to you.'

Willow hands the paper over apologetically.

'It's not your hand-writing,' she says. 'It's - I think it's doughnut grease.'

Tara smooths out the page and reads aloud:

'Cast in bone and sinew

Hidden in flesh,

Committed to the form of the adored child,

Defended at high cost by the Guardian of the Race:

The Key of the Gates.

xxx

'I halt the recanting of the word.

I halt the reclamation of space.

I overturn the Dissolution Rites of Ganash.

xxx

With the free-flowing blood of the hungry dead,

I buy you from the Prophets of Dagon.

The name, the body, the life of the Key

Pass to Dawn, the daughter of Hank.'

'That's the spell,' she finishes. 'I didn't have a whole lot of time to work on the poetry, but the sense is right - I think. I don't know where we went wrong.'

'"The free-flowing blood of the hungry dead,"' muses Willow. 'That has to mean vampire-blood, right? I mean, it couldn't be about zombies, or - or eating-disorder patients?'

'Maybe it wasn't free-flowing enough?' suggests Xander. 'Maybe if we brought the vamp right to the circle of power and serve him up freshly-squeezed?'

There's minimal reaction to this. Willow gives him a small smile. Tara's still studying the crumpled page. But then she looks up at him, frowning.

'Free-flowing...' she says, vaguely perturbed. 'When I was translating that part, there were some variations...' She slides the Diary out from under a pile of volumes, opens it to a post-it-note-marked page and reads out her own pencil jottings. '"Free-flowing blood. Can also mean gladly-flowing, but unlikely.' She looks up.

'What if it means gladly-flowing?' she says, bleakly. 'What if that's what it means? Vampire's blood, willingly given.'

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End file.
